And all who sailed on her

The Galleon is more than a cafe, it's a community living room. Gideon Haigh muses on its imminent demise.

You have to look hard to see what’s changed about St Kilda’s Galleon Cafe these days — and what’s about to. Mealtimes are as hectic as ever, mornings and afternoons as mellow and relaxed. It’s only when you breast the cash register that you glimpse the notice which, for the past few weeks, has been counting down the days left in its lifespan.

Today it will be 14 sleeps until the leasehold, fittings and goodwill are acquired from owners Janet Mill and Graham Bamford by interests associated with the George Hotel’s Melbourne Wine Room. The new proprietors want to keep the clientele, but nothing else will survive, not even the name. "Pizzas and beer" is the funky formula of which they’ve spoken publicly.

Such transactions are seldom marked; cafes in this area rise and fall like African dictators, without nearly the same possibilities for personal enrichment.

Yet the Galleon has been serving St Kilda for almost 20 years — for the past 17 from 9 Carlisle Street, near its convergence with Acland Street, separating St Kilda Bikes from the St Kilda Laundrette and Solarium Centre shop.

Along with Brunswick Street’s Black Cat, the Galleon is one of Melbourne’s original modern cafes, marking the divergence of the local model from the imported Italian form. It pays homage to the old ways with its 50-year-old Gaggia espresso machine, still serviced by Flavio, the craftsman who constructed it in South Melbourne’s now-defunct Gaggia factory. But it is also festooned with original artworks and found objects, from a table shaped like the prow of a boat that protudes from a wall, to the "Philips Schoolroom Map of Australia", in that style for which cafes nowadays so often strive — usually without success.

There’s no hiding it either: I’m acutely fond of the Galleon. This is something that, even now, I find difficult to explain. I’m not a nostalgist by nature, and food, frankly, has always seemed to me a bit overrated. At home, I prefer dishes edible with one hand — so the other can prevent the book I’m reading from closing — and with no more than two ingredients, usually a can and an opener (a third, salt, is discretionary).

Cafes, moreover, tend to annoy or depress me in their desperation to either cosy up to customers or strike some sterile vibe, while I would cheerfully support a newspaper moratorium on the c-word: "coffee". I’m not even sure I like St Kilda all that much, at least since it began pricing out of its environs most of the things for which it was famous.

Yet over the past eight years, I’ve been a Galleon habitue of the most boringly reliable sort, relying on it as an alternative living room, varying my choices from its menu only minimally: I now receive a spanakopita and Greek salad unless I say otherwise immediately. Even then, compared with some other veterans always to be seen pecking at the morning papers or sitting for hours over glasses of water cordially unmolested by staff, it’s still possible to feel as though one has just arrived. And like its overburdened notice board encrusted with rooms to let and plays and bands to see, the Galleon is the work of many hands.

The St Kilda Galleon Cafe — to give it its full pomp — emerged from a proposal for a cafe-cum-gallery by a like-minded group of local artists in 1984. Trading from rooms at 137A Acland Street, it borrowed its name from an older light entertainment venue that had traded nearby during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

"Did you remember the old Galleon?" a local was heard to say. "Well, they’ve opened it up again."
Not quite. This Galleon was funded into being as a Community Employment Project, which underwrote four poorly-paid positions. One was taken by Mill, then 28, a quondam tram conductor and fruit picker. Her original workmates all left their marks: Bill Hay built the original bar with wooden arms cradling St Kilda; Bill Laycock laid his hands on the Galleon’s chandeliers and organised subscriptions to unintelligible anarchist magazines; Richie Clendinnen, who’d always managed to save a little money while on the dole, acted as egg chef and lender of last resort.

But Mill didn’t so much take her job as seize it with both hands. "The people who put together the proposal, they were all writers or painters and had things going on, so they didn’t want jobs really," she says. "But I did. I was desperate to get off the dole."

Mill had worked as a cook in a bed-and-breakfast hostel in Switzerland, and learned more about the trade from working part-time for Henry Maas at the new-fashioned Black Cat. But the Galleon soon developed a character of its own. Its staple became simple, fresh and nourishing food served for next to nix: the spana, the snags, the ploughman’s, the chicken and leek pie. There were separate price lists for employed and unemployed, and no one who really couldn’t pay did.

The work was, like its locale, often unpredictable. One afternoon, Mill was mugged by the burly proprietor of another cafe, whose pokie winnings had been stolen during their counting by a disembodied hand reaching under the door of a toilet cubicle at the St Kilda RSL. As both pugilists had pink hair at the time, it provided a colourful street theatre interlude before agreement that it had involved a case of mistaken identity.

On another morning, Clendinnen popped out to buy Promite and vanished, leaving the Galleon without a chef for almost three hours. He had been accosted by the police and invited to form part of an identity parade. The round-up took longer than expected, it seems, because of the need to find six-footers to flank a diminutive rapist.

The cafe espoused an anarchist creed and became a bolthole for a number of communities. Poets took it over for Friday night readings. A film society showed movies there. The Gaggia, found in pieces on a suburban verandah, served coffee that kept patrons going until 3am closing. But it also lived up to its ethos in never having any money. Even the repartee with which Mill and Clendinnen sum up the period is economical.

"Then I cracked the s---- and left," says Richie.

"Everyone cracked the s---- and left," adds Mill.

"That’s because Janet’s very difficult to work with," replies Clendinnen.

"I’m very bossy," says Mill.

She is also uncommonly determined. After two years, the Galleon was tipped out of its home. Its assets were furniture, fittings, goodwill and a big fat debt to Clendinnen, which was discharged with a benefit concert at the Prince of Wales Hotel headlined by X and the Cosmic Psychos; seven bands played for a slab of beer each. The cafe survived only as a glimmer in Mill’s eye. Then Margaret Dillon, a friend of Mill’s sister Sally, somehow scrabbled together $10,000 to become a partner in a new site round the corner, formerly occupied by a furniture retailer, Twentieth Century Design.

The new premises were smaller, but the eye-catching
ground floor shopfront, with its seahorse-shaped doorhandles, was a boon.
Traffic swelled. Artworks large and small accumulated. The omnicompetent artist
Felix Baker crafted the aromatic coffee cup symbol over the doorway, and donated
the boat table that had previously served in his kitchen. Sally Mill made the
vivid red and orange curtains; Fiona Somerville painted The Horse
Riders
, my personal favourite, to hang over Clendinnen’s chalkboard scroll menu; from a customer came the mirror etched with the image of a man-o-war.

Regulars ranged from Michael Leunig to "Crack", so-named for his low-slung trousers. Mill once threw him out for showing her his dirty postcards.

Dillon was bought out nine years ago by Bamford, a long-standing friend of Mill’s who’d worked at the Galleon since its move. And in the 1990s, the cafe stumbled, amiably, a little blearily and almost accidentally, into economic viability.

Not that arriving at the Galleon has ever felt like walking into a business. If anything, with its laminex tables and open cooking and wet areas, it’s usually reminded me of the kitchen of my childhood — perhaps part of its charm. I remember seeing Claudia Karvan there one day, and my heart going out to her because she looked so wretchedly tired. But then I realised that she’d clearly sussed the Galleon: it was a place you could come when you felt like hell.

The Galleon never really looked like it was hurrying. The menu stated that breakfast was served until the quirkily precise time of 3.45pm, although I could scarcely believe that a later request would be denied. And the Galleon’s preference has always been for nice and interesting waiters rather than emphatically good ones; its alumni ranges from Bill Walsh of the Psychos to Greg Roberts of Shantaram fame.

When Mill and Bamford broke the news of the Galleon’s sale to staff a few weeks ago, long-serving Viv asked plaintively: “Who’s going to employ all of us lot if you don’t?” Yet, if I sometimes had slow service at the Galleon, I never had bad; I certainly never encountered the proverbial surly actress awaiting discovery. If the attentions of the waiting staff wandered, I guessed it was to something worth thinking about; I was never fussed about taking my own plates back to the counter.

The food, meanwhile, was always just right, tasty even to my coffee, cigarette and salt-scarred palate. Curiously, I always nurtured the thought that it was of a kind I might make — had I, of course, been sufficiently competent and motivated to make it.

I liked introducing people to the Galleon; I liked it even more when they already knew it and "got it". I once suggested it as a rendezvous to a stranger with a work query. "There’s this place I go," I said. "In St Kilda. You mightn’t have heard of it. It’s called the Galleon …" She replied without hesitation: "Best spanakopita in Melbourne." It turned out that she used to go there everyday for the same sandwich.

I met her at table 1, in the corner by the counter, near the kugelhupf that no one ever seems to eat. She subsequently became my girlfriend. When we returned for our anniversary recently, our favourite waitress, Kathleen, had prepared a handmade card and put candles in our apple crumbles.

It was from another waitress, the lovely Tina, that I learned about the Galleon’s impending fate. "Have you heard?" she asked when we stopped to chat in Fitzroy a few months ago. "Janet and Graham are selling."

I felt both a pang of sentiment, and a wave of chagrined resignation. It’s scarcely uncommon to feel diminished by the closure or disappearance of a favourite haunt. It is a reminder of transience, a memento mori — the thirtysomething’s version of a "senior moment". Yet the sense of loss I feel about the Galleon is not because I thought it would last forever, but because, I suspect, I always knew it wouldn’t. The disappointment I feel in having this confirmed is mingled with gratitude that it should have survived so long.

The Block
is coming to St Kilda; there seems nowhere to hide from the steady creep of crud, no way to dodge the designer jackboot of lifestyle totalitarianism. The Galleon seems to have been in perfect keeping with St Kilda at its foundation. Now, squeezed between the shopfronts on the global fast food mall and the pretensions of the $25 main-course mafia, it seems special, unusual, and maybe even out of place.

Joni Mitchell once sang about not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone. Bah! Hippy crap. Those who ran, worked for and patronised the Galleon always knew.